The present invention relates to chewing gum base, and more particularly to a process for making chewing gum base by providing the to ingredients in free flowing dry form and blending the powder ingredients together into a gum base mixture that can be used to make chewing gum.
Typically, chewing gum base has been made by adding the gum base ingredients into a heated mixer. The gum base ingredients often come in large slabs, bales or solid drums, and have to be ground, crushed or otherwise reduced in size in order to obtain the desired quantity for a batch of gum base and to feed the ingredients into the mixer. In the mixer, the gum base ingredients are compounded and then removed from the mixer in molten form. The molten, finished gum base is processed into various forms such as pellets, slabs, laminated casts, strands, etc., ready for packaging and sale. When used to make chewing gum, the gum base is melted and mixed with the other chewing gum ingredients.
This typical process, though widely used, has several drawbacks. First, many different chewing gum bases have to be prepared, each including either different ingredients or different proportions of ingredients, to meet the needs of different chewing gum manufacturers for each of their products. Since the compounding of chewing gum base typically takes 20 minutes or more in a mixer, making all of the different gum bases takes time. Further, the gum bases then cool prior to being shipped to an end user, who then has to remelt them in the chewing gum mixer.
Of course, there are many known variations to this process. For example, U.S., Pat. Nos. 5,571,543; 5,523,097; 5,419,919 and 5,397,580 disclose processes of making chewing gum base in a continuous fashion. In the example in these patents, a filler with a particle size less than 12 microns and an elastomer sized to 2-7 mm are mixed and added as a mixture. Powdered vegetable oils and molten polyisobutylene are also added.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,567,450 discloses a gum base manufacturing process in which certain dry powder ingredients are pre-blended with liquifiable materials before being mixed with the elastomer.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,486,366 discloses a process of making chewing gum base in a continuous mixer which includes restriction elements. A blend of ground elastomer, filler and elastomer plasticizer (with unspecified particle sizes) is fed into the mixer at one zone and other gum base ingredients are added at a later zone.
In each of these processes, the chewing gum base ingredients are compounded together in a molten form and then cooled before being used to make a chewing gum composition.
Several patents, such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,543,160 and 5,545,416 disclose a process by which gum base ingredients are compounded together in the same continuous mixer that is then used to make the chewing gum. While such a process has many benefits, it is not in widespread use, and many chewing gum manufacturers continue to use conventional equipment which operates in a batch system, and therefore desire to add the chewing gum base as an initial ingredient.
It would therefore be a great improvement if there were a less time and energy consuming method of making a variety of gum bases that could still be added as an initial ingredient into a convention chewing gum mixing operation.